


Ecce Homo

by Aloysia_Virgata



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s07e01 Sixth Extinction, Episode: s07e02 Amor Fati, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-05
Updated: 2015-01-05
Packaged: 2018-03-05 14:51:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3124214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloysia_Virgata/pseuds/Aloysia_Virgata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scully has the sense of a page turning in the book of her life, though what's written on it is anyone's guess.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ecce Homo

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Eloise and Amanda for support. For those curious about the title, it is a play on the Christ imagery of Mulder during the Sixth Extinction, as well as being the title of the book in which Nietzsche discusses the concept of amor fati.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond  
any experience,your eyes have their silence:  
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,  
or which i cannot touch because they are too near  
  
your slightest look easily will unclose me  
though i have closed myself as fingers,  
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens  
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose  
  
or if your wish be to close me, i and  
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,  
as when the heart of this flower imagines  
the snow carefully everywhere descending;  
  
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals  
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture  
compels me with the color of its countries,  
rendering death and forever with each breathing  
  
(i do not know what it is about you that closes  
and opens;only something in me understands  
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)  
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands  
  
e.e. cummings  
  
  
***  
  
The rain flings itself from the night sky with a dispassionate intensity, surging through the gutters and rushing over small dams composed of sodden leaves and sticks. Scully huddles in the downpour beneath the dark bubble of an umbrella, blinking as the wind drives sheets of water against the fine wool of her suit.  
  
Mulder's window is a black flag above her and she imagines him in those stale rooms, his jigsawed cranium pillowed on his afghan, his couch and his Yankees cap concentrated shadows in the masculine gloom of his apartment.  
  
He was coming to see her earlier and she knows in part it's because he has no one else to see but also because he's chosen to have no one else to see and between them was the fact that Diana was wrapped like supermarket steak in the fridge at the DC morgue. She'd had to tell him that and it hurt to hurt him. And, strangely, it hurt to have lost the one person who could have ever possibly understood what she has been going through.  
  
A shred of wet paper slaps against her calf, clings there like pale seaweed. Scully peels it off and feels the night through  her damp stocking.  
  
Diana is dead and Albert is dead and her father, her sister, her daughter, Jack Willis...they're all dead and she's got a scar in her belly and a mystery in her neck. She's been to Antarctica, to Africa, to the inside of an elephant and the valley of the shadow all in pursuit of this truth Mulder wants so badly to find. She doesn't know what she's doing here exactly, doesn't know what she has planned. Only that there comes a point where you're so inextricably linked to a person that it feels silly to kiss him chastely on the forehead as though you're going home to a lover or a convent rather than an uninspired salad and a closet full of matching hangers.  
   
The last few steps to Hegal Place are quickly covered and Scully has the sense of a page turning in the book of her life, though what's written on it is anyone's guess.  
  
She closes her umbrella and enters his building. There's a sludge of dirty water puddled beneath the mailboxes, presided over by a WET FLOOR sign. Scully takes particular care not to slip, because wouldn't it just be something to make it all the way here and smash her coccyx? She'd have to call for help, then spend the next month at work with a humiliating little donut-shaped pillow. Mulder would be rhapsodic with the one-liner potential.  
  
Her impractical shoes carry her safely to the elevator and she wishes she had a pen to twist or gum to snap or anything, really, to vent off this nervous energy that's making her click her nails together in an irritating fashion. Down the hall to his apartment when the doors slide open, the honeycomb floor tracked with mud and organic debris. She has a flash of herself laid out here and her prefrontal cortex, all grown up at thirty-five, urges her to turn back, whispering that Mulder is mad, bad, and dangerous to know.  
  
So am I, she tells it, and knocks on the door. She thumbs a rough patch on the wall while she waits, wondering how to begin.  
  
"Scully," Mulder says, surprised and sleepy. He's wearing only boxers and she sees the imprint of a couch cushion seam on his chest. "Is everything all right?"  
   
"Why is it that the only rule you and I seem to hold sacrosanct is the one that might make us happy, Mulder?" she blurts, and her stomach lurches in horror. She wants to flee, let him think he hallucinated this in his post-op haze, but instead walks gamely past him to prop her umbrella in the corner.  
  
Mulder shuts the door and pads after her, looking more than a little crazed in his underwear and gauze crown. "Is that a riddle," he asks, pulling on a t-shirt. "Why is a raven like a writing desk?"  
  
She ignores him and, reflecting upon hallucinations, remembers his funeral here. He's going to die one day. Maybe soon. Some unworthy foe will put a bullet through his fascinating head and though he seems indestructible, he will, in fact, die. They'll hang a star upon the wall and the world will continue spinning madly around her.  
  
Or, then again, maybe it'll be her. The cancer will come back to hollow her out, or they'll find her like Diana with the ruin of her face stuck to the carpet by a puddle of her own congealed blood. Their sphere holds an endless mine of unsavory demises.  
  
"Scully, are you all right?" Mulder asks, slouching against the wall. "The thing with Albert Hosteen...I know that hit you pretty hard. Can I get you something? A drink?"  
  
She shakes her head, walking to the living room. On the coffee table is an almost-empty container of Top Ramen and she's sad at the thought of him slurping noodles from a disposable bowl and watching something awful on the television while he  recovers from brain surgery. She's sad at the thought of her magazine-perfect apartment, free of dust and clutter and everything at perfect right angles.  
  
Scully looks at the fish, at the reams of printouts and haphazard stacks of arcane journals. Her hands slide restlessly over his desk, his CDs, his books. She smells dust and algae, old plaster, the wet wool of her suit, and the dry scent of Mulder's cologne. She smells darkness and cold and brilliance.  
  
Floorboards creak as he moves into the room behind her, settles back onto his murky green couch. Watches her read his story with her fingertips. Scully is unperturbed by his observation, both of them waiting for the nameless thing that drew her here to make itself undeniable.  
  
She used to be comfortable with being alone because she never felt lonely. She'd always assumed permanent companionship would be easy to find when she decided she was ready to find it. Scully is not particularly vain but she is  not ashamed to enjoy the advantages of beingintelligent and beautiful. Mulder isn't either, despite his self-effacement, and wedlocked in weirdness as they are, she knows that he likes to look at her and that he likes her looking back. They fill up the gaps they've made in one another's lives and to that end they'd talked about a baby- _her_ baby, not _theirs_ \- but still. Then today he called her his touchstone and that means...  
  
Nothing at all, really. At least not for the things she's begun to find herself wanting as birthdays start to pinch around the edges.  
  
Scully touches a framed picture of Samantha on the bookshelf. Strange to feel so well acquainted with a girl she never knew. Sometimes she thinks she knows Samantha better than her own dead sister. Sometimes she thinks she must not have a soul because she can cut up dark-eyed girls with long braids and beautiful women with long red curls and it does not faze her. She does not feel her own pulse when she examines their severed carotids, does not hear her own laughter in their broken throats. It must mean something, to peer into the Styx so often without encountering her reflection.  
  
Mulder bleeds for every lost little girl, gives his heart to slender brunettes.  
  
"What do you see, Mulder? When you look at me." Her voice sounds strange and dreamy to her, but maybe she's just not used to hearing it ask question is like that.  
  
He rises, and the floor creaks again as he walks. She is aware of the ambient heat of his body behind her. She can smell aftershave on his sleep-warm skin, Neosporin and iodine under his bandages. Scully feels the phantom weight of his hand at her hip, the smooth grain of the bat.  
  
Silence for a beat longer.  
  
"I see all the ways you are," he tells her.  
  
She shivers a little. "You read my mind?" The hand on her hip is real now, past and present running together like chalk pictures in the pouring rain. The _thock_! of the ball, the rolling drums of thunder outside...  
  
"Never had to."  
  
"Then you know it isn't Albert."  
  
"I know." Mulder rests his chin on the crown of her head, fingers drawing circles under the hem of her suit jacket. His breath is warm in her hair, raising goosebumps on her neck. His chest rises against her back, heating up the blood that has begun to pound in her temples.  
  
His hand curves around the fine ridge of her hipbone, thumb nestled against the lee of it.  
  
They do not speak again of the baby she wants, the one they can never make this way. They breathe together for a time, enjoying the luxury of being alive that reveals itself so perversely in times of mourning. The storm sings lowly outside, perhaps a dirge. Perhaps a love song.  
  
Soon, she will turn in his arms, her mouth tipped up for years of kisses. Mulder will accidentally pull two silk-covered buttons from her blouse and, for the rest of their lives, she will tease him about it. She will follow him to his bedroom and not say a word about his bed, but will be captivated by the reflected image of her white leg drawn up against his hip. When her teeth hit the dip above his collarbone, when her nails rake along the rise of his spine, he will call to a god he doesn't believe in. He will whisper her name like a secret.  
  
Scully will watch the wings of his scapulae, the flexion of his back, and think him the most elegant machine she has ever examined. She will arc beneath him like a moonbeam.  
  
There will be blood on the pillow from his forehead, blood on the sheets from places in her left too long untouched since Ed Jerse. Her throat will ache from wanting to cry and holding back for fear Mulder will misunderstand.  
  
When the morning comes, Scully will kiss his sleeping lips before taking a shower. She will she steal out quietly, back through the muddied lobby, and catch a cab home.  
  
And because he has seen into parts of her she doesn't know about, he will smile at the wrinkled sheets. He will shower in a bathroom still humid from the steam she made, and dress at leisure. He will bring her umbrella by, and end up staying the night.  
  
She will cry this time, and he will never really leave.  
  
***


End file.
